David R. Jackson is a compliance manager, and has been for over twenty years. As a consequence, he knows better than anyone the delicate balancing act being a compliance professional requires.

Compliance leadership within a business requires maintaining five different conversations concurrently: (1) with the business, (2) with senior management, (3) with other teams that support the business, (4) with the government agencies and industry groups that provide external oversight, and (5) with the compliance staff. The challenge is not carrying out any one conversation, but juggling all conversations at the same time, and constantly shifting gears between conversations with different audiences.

Last month Josh Rosen, a junior at UCLA who plays quarterback, was quoted by a national sports news website saying, “Football and school don’t go together.” Within hours UCLA’s coach and Stanford’s coach each tried to paint the young man as unenlightened.

Research shows that Rosen is more correct than the coaches admit, but that’s only part of the story. What’s news is that a twenty-year-old—not a university trustee or president, not a U. S. District Court judge or an antitrust lawyer—put his finger on a regulatory reality that higher education may not be able to ignore for much longer.

Apple has developed and distributed a curriculum that will teach students at 30 community colleges around the country to write code and create apps. What prompts this gift? A belief that we all bear responsibility for sustaining a functional economy. At a time when some corporate leaders and their legal teams focus on the perils of overregulation, the greatest regulatory risk an enterprise confronts may not be high compliance hurdles, but rather the possibility that regulators can’t keep the economy functioning well enough for the enterprise to do its most commercially inventive and societally valued work.